A serviceman of the Azerbaijani State Border Service (SBS), Asgar Musazada, was killed after stepping on a landmine in the Jabrayil district. Armenia’s mine terrorism against Azerbaijan remains one of the serious issues in the post-conflict period. Peaceful Azerbaijani citizens continue to die and suffer severe injuries.
Azerbaijan has repeatedly demanded that Armenia provide accurate minefield maps to ensure the safe return of former displaced persons to their homeland and to restore regions damaged by nearly three decades of occupation. However, the Armenian side continues to arrogantly claim that it has supposedly handed over all available minefield maps to Azerbaijan, which is completely contrary to reality.
The spokesperson for the Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ani Badalyan, recently made such false claims. She stated that on June 12, July 3, October 19, November 1, and November 29, 2021, Armenia unilaterally and without preconditions provided Azerbaijan with 972 minefield maps.
The questionable statistics were presented by Yerevan in response to Baku’s well-founded accusation that Armenia had not provided Azerbaijan with all the maps of mined territories.
Earlier, the spokesperson for the Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Aykhan Hajizada, in an interview with Envoy magazine, revealed that the accuracy of the minefield maps provided by Armenia to Azerbaijan is only 25 per cent.
“Over 55% of recent landmine cases have occurred outside the areas covered by these maps,” emphasized the spokesperson of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“While Armenia’s maps indicated that approximately 400,000 landmines were planted in Azerbaijan’s territories, the actual number is closer to 1.5 million,” said Hajizada.
The country’s government regularly informs the international community that Azerbaijan does not possess a complete list of accurate minefield maps held by Armenia at various international forums.
Mine clearance is a complex process, especially in the absence of accurate minefield maps. President Ilham Aliyev has pointed out, not by chance, that Azerbaijan is among the most mine-contaminated countries in the world.
At the plenary session of the 6th Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Astana in October 2022, the head of state emphasized that, according to preliminary estimates, Armenia laid more than one million mines on Azerbaijani territories during the occupation, and clearing these mines would require almost 30 years and 25 billion US dollars.
In April 2022, Azerbaijan proposed the creation of a Global Trust Fund to combat the mine threat. This was reported by the Assistant to the President and Head of the Foreign Policy Department of the Presidential Administration, Hikmet Hajiyev, while speaking at the international conference “Humanitarian Mine Action and Sustainable Development Goals” in Baku.
The refusal of the official Yerevan to provide Baku with accurate minefield maps clearly demonstrates that the Armenian side is intentionally continuing its policy of aggression against the country and is unwilling to stop its mine terrorism against peaceful citizens.
After their defeat in Karabakh in 2020, Yerevan is attempting to use mine terrorism as a tool of revenge against Azerbaijan’s civilians, which is, without a doubt, a war crime that deserves appropriate punishment under international law.
The recent statements by the Armenian side claiming that Yerevan supposedly handed over new minefield maps to Azerbaijan in early 2024 are complete nonsense and yet another attempt by the Armenian authorities to deceive the international community.
The annually increasing statistics of peaceful citizens being injured by mines in Azerbaijani territories clearly show that the maps provided by Armenia are far from accurate.
Another tragic incident recently occurred in the Agdam district of Azerbaijan, where a 57-year-old local resident was injured by a landmine, serving as yet another confirmation of mine terrorism.
Since the end of the Second Karabakh War in 2020, 387 Azerbaijani citizens have been affected by mines—among them, both fatalities and those who have sustained serious injuries.
To address this issue, significant financial resources have been allocated in the country’s state budget. In 2021, more than 100 million manats ($59 million) were allocated for mine clearance operations in the liberated territories of Karabakh. Additionally, 48.9 million manats ($28.7 million) were allocated from the President of Azerbaijan’s Reserve Fund in 2021 for the reconstruction of cities in Azerbaijan that were destroyed as a result of Armenia’s prolonged military occupation.
Just last month, the Azerbaijan National Agency for Mine Action (ANAMA) discovered and neutralized 331 antipersonnel mines, 105 antitank mines, and 9,755 unexploded ordnance during demining operations in several regions of the country. As a result, 4,556 hectares of Azerbaijani territory were cleared of mines during this period.
By ignoring Baku’s demands for providing minefield maps, Armenia flagrantly violates the norms and principles of international humanitarian law, including the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
The international community must condemn Armenia’s policy of mine terrorism and compel the official Yerevan to provide Azerbaijan with accurate information on the geography of mined Azerbaijani territories.
In October 2021, American lawyer Donald Francis Donovan, during hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on Azerbaijan’s lawsuit against Armenia for violations of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, urged the International Court to urgently apply interim measures against Armenia.
At the beginning of this year, Azerbaijan filed a lawsuit against Armenia at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague based on the 1979 Bern Convention, demanding compensation for the environmental damage and destruction of the unique nature of Karabakh and Eastern Zangezur. A similar lawsuit awaits Armenia concerning mine terrorism against Azerbaijan, which not only undermines the Armenian authorities’ loud statements about their commitment to peace but also hinders the development of the entire region. Sooner or later, Armenia will have to answer for every crime it has committed.
Matanat Nasibova
Caliber.az
